Is Your Company Mobile Ready?

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1 Is Your Company Mobile Ready? A CAPRIZA WHITEPAPER JANUARY 2014

2 Summary There s more to going mobile than appointing a mobility task force and developing an enterprise mobility strategy. Those are two essential steps in the right direction, but with those two measures taken care of, the journey toward meeting all of the mobility needs of the business is just beginning. In this white paper, we will discuss the many layers of mobile readiness and the specific elements that comprise those layers. By the end of this white paper you ll know just how ready your company is to go mobile and what actions you may or may not need to take in order to be 100% mobile ready. Overview 1. Phases of Mobile Readiness 2. Phase 1 Enterprise Mobility Strategy 3. Phase 2 Business/IT Definition 4. Phase 3 Technical Preparation 5. Phase 4 Extension/Development Environment

3 Becoming Mobile Ready The process of becoming mobile ready involves not only technical preparation but also strategic preparation. Companies that rush to choose a platform on which to develop mobile apps without having defined a concrete strategy for short-term and long-term mobilization will be forced to leave their developers in a holding pattern while the specific use cases and mobile operating systems are chosen. The bulk of the necessary strategic planning should occur prior to engaging in technical exploration. The people actually executing the strategy will be thankful for this down the road. Here are the high level phases of mobile readiness that are essential to the successful mobilization of any enterprise: Phase 1 Development an Enterprise Mobility Strategy Since the arrival of smartphones and tablets on the IT scene within most companies, the discussion around mobility has been dominated by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend and how to address the pros and cons of this wave. Becoming mobile ready starts with having some sort of BYOD or COPE (corporate-owned, personally-enabled) strategy. Let s assume that your company has already implemented some device strategy since this has been a top-of-mind issue for most IT organizations for years now. The tactics of implementing a BYOD strategy typically involve exploring a mobile device management (MDM) solution, but MDMs are not 100% necessary for successfully mobilizing your enterprise. Gartner Says Two-Thirds of Enterprises Will Adopt a Mobile Device Management Solution for Corporate Liable Users Through 2017.

4 Once companies get past BYOD and MDM, the real strategic planning begins as CIOs, IT Directors and Managers evaluate how to effectively populate their employees devices with relevant mobile apps that stimulate greater productivity. Phase 2 Collaborative Definition of the Business Need The development, management and execution of IT projects differ from company to company, even when agile methodologies are utilized across the board. The first step in this phase of becoming mobile ready is for the essential employees in the IT organization (the decision-makers, project managers, etc.) to come together with the stakeholders on the business side and establish an open, ongoing communication channel between both teams. If the relationship between these two organizations is cold, closed or overly bureaucratic, the project will move slowly and the end result will suffer significantly. The second and most important step in this phase is for IT and the business stakeholders to define the business need, with regard to mobility, in as narrow terms as possible. In an ideal scenario, those in collaboration would be able to answer these questions definitively: Which workflows, specifically, do employees need to be able to perform from their mobile devices? Which types of devices do those employees use on a regular basis? Is offline functionality absolutely necessary for a particular mobile workflow? What barriers might prevent an employee from utilizing a custom mobile app and how can those be circumvented? What is driving this demand for mobility and what does the business stand to gain by providing it? To be clear, it is not necessary to have a comprehensive, detailed description of every conceivable mobility request. The key is to have a solid jumping off point in the form of 3-5 business-critical processes that employees need to be able to perform from their mobile devices. The only way to effectively establish that launching point and get the entire mobilization process started off on the right foot is for the company to collaborate crossfunctionally and agree to a first round of goals, priorities and expectations.

5 Here is an example of one particular goal that IT and the business stakeholders might define through their collaboration: Web Application Workflow Device(s) # of Users Priority SAP CRM7 Edit Lead Info ios/android With 3-5 of this type of clearly defined starting goals, IT can move forward toward the next phase in the company s evolution of becoming fully mobile ready. Phase 3 Technical Preparation The degree to which a company has the proper technical infrastructure in order to provide mobile access to its existing business applications varies depending on a number of factors. Firstly, different business applications (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Salesforce custombuilt, etc.) require different upgrades and integrations in order to begin developing mobile apps. This variation underscores the importance of thoughtfully defining what needs to be mobilized. The technical aspects of becoming mobile ready commonly involve some combination of these changes: Business Application Upgrade In order to begin any further customization to an existing business application, especially when it comes to legacy systems like SAP or Oracle, companies are often times required to upgrade to a newer or more advanced version of that application. Software providers are not merely looking to get more money from their customers by forcing them to upgrade; they want their customers to have the best possible performance and user experience, which regularly means upgrading to a new version of the software. If this is a requirement for going mobile, IT should address it sooner rather than later because it can become a burdensome bottleneck impeding the execution of a well-thought out mobility strategy. API Development Pulling information from a database into another system or trying to display data through third-party user interface is easier said than done. Manipulating that data and sending it back to the database is especially challenging when working with systems that weren t originally designed to integrate with other systems. Talented API developers can take care

6 of this problem by building bridges (a.k.a. APIs) between systems, but the larger the company, the more systems that need APIs. This aspect of technical preparation is not required for every company or mobility project. However, if IT has decided that it will exclusively develop native mobile applications, it is highly likely that it will need to develop APIs and potentially even install an API development layer onto its stack. Database Upgrade Data migration and database upgrading can sometimes be critically important for becoming mobile ready. Upgrades are a fundamental and basic part of properly maintaining any database, but with upgrades come changes to the system and new sets of system requirements. The overarching point here is that in order to develop on top of your existing enterprise application (which leverages a database to house its data), you may need to do some significant work on the backend. Security Layer On top of the existing security infrastructure in which IT has invested heavily over the past several decades, certain approaches to enterprise mobility require additional layers of security to be installed in order to secure not only the mobile devices but also the transfer of corporate information to those devices. For native mobile applications, the protection of corporate data is a significant concern and, often times, a roadblock to going mobile because of the potential for corporate data to be stored on a semi-secure mobile device. In most IT organizations, only a few professionals, if not only one, interact with the database and monitor it status. This is also true for the other components of a company s IT infrastructure like APIs and the application layer. The result of this is that the higher level employees in the IT organization, the Managers, Directors, VPs and the CIO, might make strategic decisions with little awareness of everything that is required in order to implement a strategy within a given timeframe.

7 Phase 4 Mobilization Technology Selection This phase of becoming mobile ready is, arguably, the most exciting. It requires an extensive analysis of the growing number of mobility solutions in the market in the context of the pre-defined needs of the business. With so many moving parts involved, selecting the right platform poses a challenge for many IT Directors, VPs and CIOs. Choosing a Mobility Solution Elements of a solution to consider: Coding vs. No coding: Companies of course have the option of extending their Oracle or SAP (or whichever business application) to mobile from scratch using native mobile application development, but there are also a number of solutions that require no coding at all. Native vs. HTML5 vs. Hybrid: Certain platforms, even those that require little to no coding, limit IT to developing native applications. Depending the goals agreed upon by IT and the business stakeholders, it is critical to choose a platform that will enable your company to provide mobile workflows to all form factors and operating systems in a scalable way. Installation vs. Saas: Almost every enterprise mobility solution requires some kind of download in order to begin the mobilization process. The information about the mobile experience being created, however, can be stored in a number of locations: on a corporate sever, on a hybrid cloud or in the public cloud. It is up to the IT team to determine how big of a factor this is in its mobilization journey. Cost: As with any enterprise technology, cost is an extremely important detail to evaluate when selecting a mobile solution. The demand for mobile access to internal business applications will continually rise in the coming years, so it is essential for companies to find a solution that will maintain its cost-effectiveness as more and more apps are developed.

8 Phase 5 Distribution, Deployment & Measurement Mechanism This final phase of becoming mobile ready can be carried out concurrently with the other phases but is often an afterthought of the IT team, which focuses primarily on choosing a technology platform to adopt. Distribution & Deployment Many companies already have a central location for distributing new technology to employees. This may be within an enterprise portal, an existing enterprise web and mobile application store or perhaps via a custom solution specific to one particular company. The important thing to consider when preparing to deploy a mobility solution to your employees is how easily users can download/access the new mobile experience. Mobile Application Management In order to ensure the proper and continuous functioning of the mobile apps that will be developed, it is essential to either build or buy a mechanism for monitoring the status of each app. Mobile Application Measurement The only way to measure the ROI of your company s investment in mobility is to measure a wide range of metrics related to mobile usage. As part of Phase 2, defining the KPIs (key performance indicators) for the mobile apps your developing will come in handy when you begin to measure the success of an app. Mobile Application Adoption The management and measurement aspects of this phase contribute to IT s ability to drive adoption of the apps that were created. Measuring usage combined with direct feedback from the app users will provide IT with the information it needs to tweak the app, re-launch it and, hopefully, better meet the needs of the users.

9 Capriza Simple. Cost-effective. Extend your business applications to mobile. No coding. No APIs. No integrations. Capriza is the simplest and most cost-effectively way to securely extend your business applications to any mobile device. Capriza s end-to-end mobility solution is comprised of a several modules: Design Rapidly simplify & transform enterprise applications to modern mobile apps. Run Instantly extend and virtualize your existing applications & infrastructure for mobile. Discover & Distribute Instantly deliver zapps to users via the Capriza App Store Security & Operations Bullet-proof device, application, data, and infra-level security. Management Real-time governance and adoption analytics for users and zapps. Integration Easily extend Capriza capabilities to existing enterprise solutions. Learn more about how you can take you company mobile in a matter of days